Since the 1980's, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) standard for the coding of digital images has been widely used as an international standard for efficiently coding continuous-tone images, JPEG has a number of different modes including sequential, progressive, lossless, and hierarchical encoding. Numerous adaptations of this technique have been made. Nonetheless, an improved image compression system has been sought that allows greater flexibility for access to compressed data as well as for the compression of images than hitherto provided.
One such proposal has been the JPEG 2000 image coding system set out in the JPEG 2000 Part I Final Draft International Standard (ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1) dated 25 Sep. 2000. Amongst other things, this system provides sophisticated features allowing a single codestream to be used efficiently in numerous applications including manipulating a codestream without decoding, matching a codestream to a transmission channel, and locating and extracting data without decoding.